Father Daughter

How do you name an instrumental track?

Last Friday we (Neil Cowley Trio) released the latest single ‘Father Daughter’ from our forthcoming album ‘Entity’.

People often ask me how I come up with names for my tracks. If I’m feeling mischievous I’ll imply that there is some kind of code or hidden meaning in amongst the notes, or that the title was conceived as its initial inspiration and then, deep in the muse, I sat down with furrowed brow to play. I saw Leonard Bernstein talking about a similar myth surrounding depressed and suicidal composers a few days ago. Debunking the fallacy that certain works were written whilst under the weight of these dire states of mind. As Bernstein quite rightly said, no composer on earth can write anything at the piano in such mindsets. At that point, the human spirit is only good for heavy drinking or staying in bed. Composition does require at least a modicum of self esteem to get off the ground. Well that is my experience of instrumental music anyway. As a great blues harmonica player said to me many moons ago, “I can only play the blues when I’m really happy’.

To draw back the veil a tad, titles attach themselves to my compositions after the event. Normally, at the point when a piece is complete enough to warrant a name. Although this flies in the face of what most people would romantically imagine to be the case, I would argue that this is where the mysticism actually reveals itself.

Whilst playing the piano, it is my endeavour to reach a heightened state and it is whilst in this state of mind that I often find myself sorting out my non musical issues with renewed clarity. The process of performance acting as a great de-tangler of the brain; the two sides of the brain working simultaneously with equal vigour.

On countless occasions I have found myself performing at a concert whilst concurrently finding solutions to problems in my life. It’s just another example of the fascinating complexity of the brain and shouldn’t be taken as a cue to ask for a refund at my gigs. My investment in the performance remains undimmed!

Likewise with composition, there is always a sub conscious thread bubbling away in the background whilst I focus on creating new music. When I come down from that mystical cloud to name a piece, I always write the first words down that come to mind and they tend to allude to those inner workings.  Here at least, there is a genuine relationship between music and title.

My track titles have often been associated with my two children, them being such a large part of my life, and in a way 'Father Daughter’ completes a circle that stems from the very beginnings of the Neil Cowley Trio.

In April 2008, myself and the trio debuted on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’, the long running live music flagship of the BBC. We were on the crest of a wave. Our second album was just out and we were enjoying a lot of positive attention from press and public. Indeed our appearance on the show galvanised that momentum. MySpace was the optimum social media space at the time and I vividly remember watching the (pre-recorded) show on the Friday night whilst sitting by my computer, logged into MySpace, preening as our numbers of followers multiplied in real time.

Conversely, on a personal level, that appearance came at the end of one of the most difficult (and yet miraculous) 3 months of my life. My daughter had been born on 12th January that year at 25 weeks gestation. She weighed 1lb 12 0z (0.8kg). So diminutive in fact that the ring on my finger fitted round her leg. The three months leading up to that point when we got her home was, as people who’ve lived through such things will know, dramatically chequered, mostly traumatic, and utterly exhausting. Especially when you already have a child at home to look after, as we did in my son. Anyhow, that appearance on ‘Later… with Jools’ was the first time I’d made any appearance in public or otherwise that wasn’t either in the natal ward, or in a car driving up and down the country chasing my wife and daughter around from hospital to hospital. So I guess I was slightly hysterical when I appeared on that show. Euphoric that life had returned, my daughter was relatively safe at home and that music was once again injecting positivity into my existence. Perhaps you can see it on my face in the video of my performance.

My daughter is now 16. The only knock on effect from her inauspicious start is that she tends to go through those key developmental stages slightly later than her peers and that has shaped her experience and informed her personality. So her early journey does still come with its own cause and effect. But she also has an inner layer of steel that I think she nurtured from those early days of fighting for her life. I’ve heard neo-natal nurses attest to such things.

That steel, however, doesn’t extend to protecting her from being sensitive. But then having a steely core doesn’t automatically preclude you from such characteristics. A little while back, she fell out with her best friend very suddenly at school and it turned her life upside down. At the apex of the trouble she ended up spending the entirety of a night in A&E with an unrelenting panic attack. It was the first time since her birth that we had spent the night in a hospital together. A reminder for me that fatherhood comes with joy and worry in equal measure with the promise of one or other around every corner. As she lay in my arms the following morning, having made it back home, the symptoms finally relenting and sleep creeping over her I was reminded of the daily cuddles that we shared in her first months. Lifted out of the incubator, covered in wires, to sit skin on skin on my chest. I have to be careful that that doesn’t hardwire her in my psyche as a fragile, defenceless being and I encourage her to grow and become independent. I don’t want to ‘over father’ her as it were. That is the dichotomy or parenthood. To hold and release.

By whatever means, this new piece of music is now inextricably linked with this title and this relationship will solidify with each performance. The melody has already come to have equivocal meaning to the words I used to describe the piece on the day of release:

‘Father Daughter is…..Dedicated to the deepest and most indefinable of special relationships; that which provides a bond of strength beyond all others and yet built upon a foundation of the utmost delicacy. It remains and prospers despite all external influence and threats. It shapes the future and it holds onto the past. It is a finite experience and yet continues beyond its own lifeline, designed to protect and nurture. Most of all, it is love at its purest; the compound of opposites.’